Description

The major new novel from the once-in-a-generation author of The End of Eddy

‘One of the most important, politically vital and morally bracing writers of his generation’ Keiran Goddard, Guardian

‘Change fills me with admiration and inspiration, as well as renewed faith in writing itself’ Maggie Nelson

‘One of the major writers of our time’ Garth Greenwell

‘I read everything he writes’ Esi Edugyan

‘A mesmeric novel’ Daily Mail

Edouard Louis longs for a life beyond the poverty, discrimination and violence in his working-class hometown – so he sets out to study in Amiens, and, later, at university in Paris. He sheds the provincial ‘Eddy’ for an elegant new name, determined to eradicate every aspect of his past. He reads incessantly; he dines with aristocrats; he spends nights with millionaires and drug dealers alike.

Everything he does is motivated by a single obsession: to become someone else. Change is at once a personal odyssey, a story of dreams, friendship and the perils of leaving the past behind, and a profound portrait of a society divided by class, inequality and power.

Translated by John Lambert

Publisher Review

One of the most important, politically vital and morally bracing writers of his generation… Change serves as a reminder of how lucky we are to have him, a writer who relentlessly chronicles the type of lives that are lived by so many but rendered by so few. — Keiran Goddard * Guardian * I feel so lucky to be living and writing at the same time as Edouard Louis. Reading the urgent, unspooling prose of Change – Louis’s latest account of a motley life lived so far – fills me with admiration and inspiration, as well as renewed faith in writing itself, and the value of paying persistent, pellucid attention to our relations, desires, histories, and selves. — Maggie Nelson The most nuanced and candid portrait of Louis’s life yet… In Change, Louis razes his own psyche with the same unsparing ferocity that he applied to revealing every squalid detail, every act of brutality, every note of despair in The End of Eddy * Daily Telegraph * Compelling… Louis is a very good writer and, as evidenced in the self-lacerating elegance of his latest book, getting better all the time. * Observer * A mesmeric novel. * Daily Mail * Edouard Louis is one of the major writers of our time, and Change is a profound novel about self-fashioning and the challenge, the defiance, and the ruthlessness of art. I read it with immense pleasure and admiration. The unsparing examination of poverty and extreme privilege in modern France (and, when you squint your eyes, sort of everywhere else, too); the rendering of an appetite for better, different, more that can no longer reasonably be satisfied. Here, self-invention is an act of brutal violence with no discernible survivors. — Marley Marius * British Vogue Best Books of 2024 * Edouard Louis is a master of the poetics of juxtaposition, elucidating the hostile and the intimate, the murky and the pure, the vulnerable and the resilient, the changeable and the unchangeable of the world, with his brilliant and preternatural intelligence. Change is a poignant and compelling read! — Yiyun Li Elegantly and unobtrusively translated by John Lambert… Change displays exhilaratingly the boldness of invention that underlines the author’s desperation to explain himself * Times Literary Supplement *